Most large businesses (and many smaller businesses and organizations) employ one or more business applications, and in some cases, suites of business applications, to provide visibility and control over various aspects of the business. Such “business applications” (or, as they are sometimes called, “enterprise applications”) can include, without limitation, customer relations management (“CRM”) applications, enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) applications, supply chain management applications, and other applications dealing with various finance, accounting, manufacturing, and/or distribution functions, to name but a few examples. Exemplary enterprise application suites include, without limitation, the Oracle eBusiness Suite and JD Edwards Enterprise One, both of which are available from Oracle Corp.
To maximize the utility of a business application, users need to have visibility into the business processes managed by the business application, to monitor the health (e.g., the efficiency, operational status) of various business processes, and of the enterprise itself. Business applications, however, typically are more focused on managing the business processes (for example, acquiring, generating and processing business data) than on providing immediate visibility into the health of those business processes.
Consequently, many enterprise users either purchase third party business intelligence tools to integrate with the business application and/or suite, or develop their own business intelligence solution. The cost of business intelligence software is expensive (sometimes prohibitively so), however, and the complexity of such tools often requires intimate knowledge of extract-transform-load (“ETL”) technology and system integration simply to integrate an off-the shelf business intelligence tool. Similarly, it can be prohibitively expensive and/or time-consuming to develop a business intelligence solution in house, given the complexity of modern business applications and the lack of a preexisting framework within such applications to develop, add or modify such a solution.
Accordingly, there is a need for a more practical tool to provide visibility into business processes. In some cases, it would be helpful if such a tool were to provide real-time (or near real-time) visibility into the business processes. In other cases, it would be beneficial for such a tool to be relatively configurable by an end-user (and/or support staff) to mitigate the expense (both fiscally and chronologically) of developing solutions that fit the needs of the end-user.